Is this a d--- move, hypocritical move or not? A close relative of mine just died. I helped write the obituary and was with her to the end. Due to the general nature and climate on findagrave rn, I've noticed a trend of "number collectors" who will sit for hours on obituary websites, racing to create a memorial when an obit is posted the chance they get to. Even if the person in question wasn't buried or had a official resting place yet. These people are vultures for numbers and usually won't upkeep these memorials or transfer them to close relatives.

Because of this, after the obit was posted and my family was settled, I decided to create a memorial (funeral isn't for another month) so that my relative can have a memorial that will be honored and properly mainted by me on the site. Is this me being a hypocrite? Am I justified in doing this? Also, if I post her obit that I helped write on the memorial, will I get in trouble due to copyright laws? Just wondering and would like some words from other users ...

Tyra Hunter was a trans woman from Washington DC who, after being in a car accident, was essentially left to die by paramedics when they found out she had male genitalia. It was a big deal to the trans community at the time but records of the whole ordeal weren't well-kept. I know she must be buried somewhere in DC, as multiple articles that I've trawled from the time mention a funeral that 1,000-2,000 people attended. However, I'm inexperienced with searching for graves, so I thought I'd turn to this community for help. Any tips are appreciated, I would love to drop by someday and leave some token behind for a lovely soul gone too soon.

https://preview.redd.it/dpv25pqummzd1.png?width=180&format=png&auto=webp&s=4adae9d840306e31ff4cd6eede9014d88990c3f2

Awhile ago I posted about a FG member who wouldn't transfer some immediate family graves including my father. His account seemed to have been suspended for several months after I made a complaint. His account is up and active again with a huge list of personal rules regarding the memorials he runs. This one made me laugh. I'm sure it wont be long till he is given the boot again.

Hi all - I wanted to ask what is the “rule” or best practice with prefixes (especially regarding the military)?

I have tried to put in whatever is on the stone if they fall under the standard prefixes, since I am an avid app user, as I have been working to fix some of the “secion” and “setion” errors from a previous post.

I include the prefix or veteran suggestions if I see them to help with search but I have received some declines with the reasoning of them not being actively in the military at their death. I don’t want to make a mistake and wanted to ask for guidance here!

Thanks in advance!

I found a woman who was married twice, and has two headstones, next to both husbands. Different cemeteries in different states. The second headstone only lists her second husband’s surname, so it didn’t come up when I searched, and only just realized she already has a memorial.

I’ve searched everywhere and I can’t tell where she was actually buried.

I’m fairly sure mine is a cenotaph, as it’s next to her first husband.

So far I’ve marked mine as a cenotaph. But do I mark the two men as her spouses? It would be accurate, but on their memorials would look like they married two women with near identical names.

Is there a way to mark my memorial as the cenotaph of the other memorial, without merging them?

When submitting recent edit suggestions to a memorial, I noticed that the manager's profile "is not available". What does that mean? As in, is this a technical error? Have they been recently reported as a "fallen graver"? Has their account been flagged for some other reason? They still manage nearly 20,000 memorials.

Go to the main page, in the plot field type "secion" without the quotes and hit search. Should be over 3k of them as of this writing. I would be nearly 100% of them meant to say "Section" with the t not missing. I have been putting in edits today but too many.

I put this in the note section of my edits: Section is typo'd without the "t" so showing as "Secion".

So if everyone who reads this puts in a dozen or so edits we can knock these out in no time.

Also try "setion" I see there are over 3k of those as well. I haven't put any edits in for those.

Has anyone been successful in removing a sponsorship for a memorial? I sponsored one years ago but since the new upgrade to make the sponsored memorial better, I am not liking it at all. I actually hate it and it’s for my dad. I guess I could remove it and replace it with a new one and be sure NOT to sponsor it this time. Thoughts?

I’m trying to transcribe some photos to help out but they won’t go through and give me an error code. Is this happening to anyone else?

to be completing photo requests and expecting gratitude or a parade of praise. But I’m genuinely asking, is it normal to complete 50 or so photo requests with just one thanks? I’ve only ever gotten one response and it’s completely fine but I’m just wondering if that’s the norm and you shouldn’t expect a response?

Someone even claimed a request of mine and I messaged them 3 weeks ago with a “thanks for requesting” and what I know of the grave.. no response? I have messages enabled on my profile. Are people just non communicative on this app or am i doing something wrong?

Hello! I have used find a grave for a little while to help find leads for other work, but for kicks today I decided to look up my family name. One of my grandparents has their death certificate posted with their grave record. Does this happen very often? It just struck me as odd, especially considering it had a living family member's current address on it. I've used this site a fair bit, but this is the first time I've seen a death certificate. Not totally sure how I feel, considering it's a close family member's. I understand it may be public record, but I was curious to know what more seasoned users had to say on the matter. This might be a naive question, so please be nice.

I really wish I custom sort the order of people in my virtual cemetery. It would be nice if the first person was the father then mother then children oldest to youngest.

Also sort the order of my cemeteries as a whole but for now I just put a 1, 2, 3, etc. to get them in my “custom order”

How can I shoot this up the chain to FG? They operate their website like it’s 2005 still.

tried different browsers, clearing cookies, signing out and signing back in, and restarting my computer. my internet connection is fine, so it must be something on their end.

I’m an avid thrifter, and earlier this week I was looking through a handbag and found this memorial pamphlet from 1995. I didn’t buy it, but made sure to take photos. Once I got home and looked up his memorial page, I found it was completely lacking on any information about his life. So I uploaded this, and also uploaded a screenshot of his obituary from newspapers.com that included a thumbnail of his portrait.

I know it’s not much, but this is how I contribute to FG. I started out by creating virtual cemeteries when I got interested in ancestry, and made sure to add pictures to memorials of people I knew whenever possible. Mostly family/ancestors, a few friends, but I eventually began to add to the occasional stranger that I randomly stumble across, like the gentleman above.

As I’ve said many times before, we are more than just our names and the years that we have walked this earth, and I’m compelled to add a touch of humanity to these individuals whenever possible, as a way to honor the very full lives that just happen to have passed before us.

How do you request a memorial of a "person" that does not exist to be taken down?

I have sent suggestions and requested proof of said "person"'s existence and the manager has not complied with proof. I know the manager can't and won't provide proof because the person does not exist, thanks to horrible poor geneology research by the wishful thinking.

What do do?

I'm a bit new to Find a Grave, and I noticed a few of my family members who have died in more recent years aren't listed on the site. I want to add them all, but a few of them have been cremated.

I know there is an option to add cremation for the burial information, but I was wondering what people's opinions were on doing this. I've seen mixed feelings from the small amount of discussions I've found online, and I'm still torn on whether I should add them or not.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hi I was wondering if somebody could help me. Apologies if this is against the rules. I would like a photo of a relatives grave but I am in a different country and have no family I could ask. The grave is in Birmingham U.K. I have the plot number I think somewhere. I have looked online and on the site but there are no photos currently. Thank you in advance.

I find it extremely disrespectful. I lost a friend to suicide last month and I'd be absolutely devastated if I found her memorial and it said 'slit her wrists' or 'knife down her throat' or 'train track decapitation'. And I've seen A LOT like this, where they add absolutely nothing about the person other than this. I get adding 'cause of death: suicide'. But the rest? I just find it very off-putting and disrespectful.

https://slate.com/technology/2024/10/afind-a-grave-ancestry-family-grandfather-controversy.html

Y'all are probably well aware of memorials added/maintained number chasers. Those who scour local funeral homes and newspapers looking for new obituaries. I've thankfully never had to deal with one, until now.

I got a suggestion from someone on the memorial page of my uncle, who, mind you, passed away in January 2023, and his memorial page has been up since February of 2023. I created it--and marked it as "close relation" because it is.

Well, anyways, this person messages me asking for me to transfer it to them. I responded with "Unless you have a closer relationship to [insert uncle's name], I can't transfer. Sorry".

They responded, claiming they were [insert uncle's name]'s daughter, who was mentioned in the obituary. I am very close with his daughter, my cousin, and we talk/text on a daily basis. So I respond "If you're really [daughter's name], text me."

No further response. Today, out of curiosity, I clicked on their profile. Deleted by FindAGrave.

Moral of the story? Don't be so desperate for a memorial page that you choose identity theft.

Hello,

I've come up with the idea to digitalize a small village graveyard, and joined FG for that reason. My family doesn't come from this village or this area, but they have property there and are invested in preserving local history as much as possible. The graveyard has around 100 surviving graves and around 20 of those are unmarked/ have worn down markers (ex. rusted metal plates). Is there any way to record these anonymous burials in FG?

Some graves can be identified with the help of locals (7 people live in the village), but there are no plans/maps to identify the rest. Church records only mention the village name as place of burial. Playing with light, using crayons and paper, smudging snow on the headstones won't work, as they are not from stone, and have no indentations.

https://preview.redd.it/ktw1f6a5m4wd1.jpg?width=2976&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f21547d7089abbd2e70e09ca1609af667a31813a

https://preview.redd.it/zm94c7a5m4wd1.jpg?width=2976&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5e1b2d14c7197d31e1158982b639638a0b21b780

Just wish the mobile app had the features the website has such as messaging and transfer requests.

I discovered that my lightbox tool for reviewing photos on my PC can also show and map the GPS data. But not edit it.

https://www.xnview.com/en/

I found that you can erase bad GPS data from a photo with https://exiftool.org/gui/

It has a steep learning curve.

https://preview.redd.it/8uirl6katovd1.png?width=1922&format=png&auto=webp&s=9daa2c065fd357c59d5bdd3f18acb237c6544e5f

I went to Hollywood Cemetery in Gastonia, NC recently. It's a big cemetery (11,000 memorials). I had one day to spend there and planned to map as much of the cemetery as possible. It seemed weird to me that going in, 98% of the memorials lacked GPS coordinates. Also, 18% needed photos, and there were over 200 photo requests, amounting to about 2% of the memorials. The Photo Requests had poor or no location information. I figured that if I just photographed at random, 2% of my photos would satisfy photo requests.

I had a DSLR camera I used for a few photos, but mostly I used my iPhone.

My actual tally for the trip was:

Photo Requests Fulfilled:        11 memorials
New Memorials Added:             71 memorials
Photos Added:                   147 memorials
GPS Coordinates Only Added:     348 memorials
TOTAL Memorials Added/upgraded: 577 memorials

I also ended up with 42 photos that were redundant in some way and were not used, for a total of 619 photos.

I was at the cemetery from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM, with about an hour break for lunch.

How did I get so many photos so quickly? First of all, it took a lot longer to process all those photos and get them into FindAGrave than it did to take them. It took a few hours a day for a week to organize them and upload them to FindAGrave. I did not use the FindAGrave App, because it would take longer at the cemetery, and most of my photos were of existing memorials.

I put my iPhone on a selfie-stick type arrangement. This allowed me to hold the phone down in front of upright monuments to get a photo without bending down. Or, for flat markers, I could hold the phone out to the side to avoid casting my shadow on the marker. To release the shutter, I used the Camera Remote on the Apple Watch. This worked well, but by the afternoon both the watch battery and the phone battery were nearly dead. I was prepared for the phone battery to die, and lashed an external phone battery to the stick with duct tape, plugged in the phone, and kept going.

Besides the Apple Watch remote, the other way to trip the shutter with the camera out of reach is with the self-timer. Three seconds is the minimum setting. This worked well, except that the Apple camera app automatically turns on burst mode (10 photos at a time) when you use the self-timer. I didn't want that, and it made a lot of extra work for me to get rid of the bursts. I recommend using another camera app such as Halide, which has a 3 second self-timer, no bursts.

I just picked a couple of smaller sections, and walked down each row taking photos. I stopped to clean or trim a few markers, but mostly this trip was about quantity, not quality.

If you look at the map of the cemetery on FindAGrave, you can easily see the areas where I was working.

At completion, the cemetery now has 7% of memorials with GPS, vs. 2% previously. I hardly made a dent in the photo requests or the percentage of memorials without photos.

After all that - I never did find my relative that I went to that cemetery looking for in the first place! :)

Tips:

• Make sure Location is turned on in your camera or phone before you start!
• To add GPS location to a memorial the easy way: upload a GPS-tagged photo of the memorial, and (if it is redundant) immediately delete it. You can do this right from the "Add Photos" dialog. At the right of the progress bar, a trash icon appears. Click that to delete the photo you just uploaded. The GPS location will NOT be deleted, however.

I've recently started adding my own relatives to FG. I live in a country with conscription for males, so my every male relative has a military rank, and I thought it's information worth adding, but now I'm having many suggestions trying to make my relative be marked as a veteran. I thought should I just remove them since there is the assumption that military rank means they fought in a war. Would it make it simpler to remove them?

Hello! I'm new to the FG site. I got curious about a elaborate stone I saw at our city's spooky cemetery walk this past weekend that had my last name on it knowing that side of the family was not native to where we currently live I got curious as to who the heck these "relatives" were. I knew of the FG website (mom is a retired genealogist after all) but wasn't aware of how extensive it is.

The jury is still out on if I am related to this "new" person but with how prolific one of my dad's great grandpas was there is a good possibility we are long distant cousins. My mom's binder on dad's side of the family is bursting there are so many out there.

ANYWAY I'm now obsessed. Both with updating my OWN family info on the FG sites and fulfilling requests. I know how important a simple, easy to read marker can be to families and researchers so I want to help!!!

There are lot of small cemeteries around my county and 3-4 larger, active ones. I have a small list of photo requests to start with from some of these smaller cemeteries very near to my house, the weather looks stunning here this weekend (south central Indiana) so I think I'm going to take my list, phone, power bank, trimmers, gloves, spray water bottle and soft bristled brush, snacks and water and head out to see if I can try to fulfil some of these photo requests.

So I'm looking for tips from long timers, or new timers on what to look out for. YES if it is on private property do not trespass. The 4 cemeteries I chose requests from are attached to churches or on public property. ;) There is a cemetery with 3 whole headstones visible from my living room window on my neighbor's property (those are all documented), and I'm a former caver I get the private property thing. Don't obstruct traffic when I park. Again most of these are well maintained locations, I'll just park near the entrance out of the way and hoof it.

One of the last things my dad was involved in before he passed away 5 years ago was the cemetery board. I did NOT get interested in this because of that involvement but I like to think it is continuing on that interest in my own small way.

Anyway, any tips, tricks and suggestions for someone new are SO welcome! Thanks!

I am very new to FG and I recently found out that a relative passed away. It was in Donetsk so it’s impossible for me to obtain the information regarding where the individual is buried.

How would I go about creating a memorial for this person?

1st I've seen in my 15 years of FindaGrave. It looks to be a fairly new plaque. I saw an older grave picture that looked about 10 years old and no plaque. Nothing too exciting just kind of interesting.